It may come as a shock that the combined military muscle of the West can't defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, but according to top military officials it is true. The Afghan adventure is expensive, onerous and unpopular, and most of the 40 or so participating countries want a new strategy. This deteriorating campaign will last for years and all that's going to change are the objectives, and as far as the United States is concerned, even these are unclear.

We can win, if you had the balls of Hitler or Stalin. We need to fight a total war as the United States fought the civil war, world war two, a war like we fought against the native indians. Yes a total war a war of extermination. This is how you win a war. The games the US plays, Nato plays these are police actions at best. A total war exacts a price on the civilian population making the pay for those armed. In a total war anything can be seen as a help to those fighting, the farmer, the merchant, the government, all who provide material, spiritual, support to those fighting must be destroyed, erased from the planet. This is how you win a war. Note the Japanese lost the will to fight after we nuked them. They understood we would kill them all! Just like we did the indians.

We could if we started fighting dirty. All that would do is create more terrorists though. It's funny, both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved de-installing American-installed regimes. After 8 years of Bush, we still haven't caught bin Laden. Sometimes I wonder if he even exists.